Story of a Poem: A Memoir

"Matthew Zapruder writes poignantly of finding joy in the precision of poetry amidst the messiness of grief, parenting, and general stresses of modern life. On the one hand, Zapruder is taking the reader on an interior journey as he describes the process of completing a poem through multiple drafts, describing his own creative process. On the other, he describes more mundane, daily struggles that any one of us might be experiencing. There’s a chapter about his experiences as a parent of a child on the autism spectrum, and his angst as a father. He’s posing existential questions about what it means to be responsible for another life. Then in a later chapter he’s struggling with smoke from the massive fires in Northern California during the early days of the pandemic. Climate change is another kind of existential threat that can seem overwhelming at the individual level. Throughout, Zapruder demonstrates not only that reading and writing poetry are a salve for the anxiety of life’s problems, but also that poetry is an essential way of making sense of the world. Story of a Poem is a memoir whose themes dovetail very powerfully with the other titles on the shortlist. I think autobiographies are fascinating because they provide so many kinds of insights! They can show us by example how other people have dealt with problems we might ourselves be facing. They can also show us the path not taken in our own lives. Or we get to live vicariously by reading about other people who may seem completely different on the surface. And when memoirs are in and of themselves artistic explorations, they can be inspiring at another level: as a way to reflect upon our daily lives as a source for artistic expression. This year’s crop of autobiographies is so diverse in terms of aesthetic sensibilities and themes, they really pushed the boundaries of the genre. I’d love to see more publishers support writers like those on our shortlist who are taking creative risks, mixing genres, mixing artistic forms—prose and imagery, prose and poetry, et cetera—while exploring the self and the world with such thoughtfulness."